Child Safety Blog

A study that tracked millions of schoolchildren shows that children are more likely to be obese when their schools are close to a fast food joint, reports Roni Rabin of New York Times. The study is headed by economists at the University of California and Columbia University, and spanned almost a decade.

Enrico Moretti, one of the study’s authors, indicated that the study does not explain why students closer to a fast food restaurant are more likely to become obese, but affirmed the “credible and unbiased” causal effect it establishes between obesity and fast food.

Providing one more piece of evidence that fast food contributes to child obesity, this study has implications for public policy, said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. Neighborhoods and school district may choose to “zone out” fast food restaurants to protect their children’s health.

Posted by Patrick A. Malone | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Childhood Nutrition

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Caffeine is technically a drug, although it's hard to think of it like that.

But some experts are saying that, because caffeinated energy drinks promise some of the same effects as prescription drugs, they should be labeled so kids know that anything that produces those effects has to be treated with caution:

Because energy drinks are touted as performance enhancers and stimulants, Dr. Roland R. Griffiths explained in an interview with Reuters Health, kids who use them for these reasons will likely be more open to trying prescription drugs that promise the same effects.

"It seems like it's a pretty easy threshold to step over, but as a society we want to make this a bright line," Griffiths said in an interview.

In their report on the marketing, regulation and health effects of caffeinated energy drinks published this month in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Griffiths and his colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine call for regulations requiring energy drink makers to list the caffeine content of their products on their labels, and warn of the potential for caffeine intoxication.

The whole article merits reading as it contains a lot of little-known information about energy drinks and how they are manufactured and what they contain.

Posted by Patrick A. Malone | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Childhood Nutrition , Drugs, Tobacco and Alcohol

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Recently, there was an outcry about new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggest giving kids as young as 8 years old cholesterol-reducing statin drugs.

Tara Parker-Pope discusses the controversy in a recent column. Those who object to the new recommendations worry about the drugs' long-term consequences, the AAP's financial relationships with drug companies and the possibility that the new guidelines will lead to overuse of the drugs. The defenders argue that the guidelines specify that only a very small group of children--those with strong genetic and lifestyle risk factors--would even be considered for statin therapy. Parker-Pope's whole article is worth reading, as it discusses both the financial and the medical aspects to this debate.

One problem here is widespread throughout medicine: what some have called "indication sprawl." Once a drug or treatment is recommended for one narrow category of patients, it tends to get indicated for more and more categories with less and less testing and justification for the new categories. But more profit for the drug makers.

Posted by Patrick A. Malone | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Childhood Nutrition , Drugs, Tobacco and Alcohol

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This blog has previously discussed the dangers of bisphenol A (called BPA), a common ingredient in the plastics used to make baby bottles, for fetuses, babies and small children. The intended effect of BPA is to make the bottle shatterproof, which it does, but now evidence of its side-effects are coming to light.

Now four Ohio parents are filing a class-action suit against five baby-bottle manufacturers, alleging that the manufacturers knew about the dangers of BPA but continued to use it in their bottles anyway.

From the article:

The parents, all from Franklin County, sued Avent America of Bensenville, Ill.; Handi-Craft Co. of St. Louis, also known as Dr. Brown's; Evenflo Co. of Vandalia; Gerber Products Co. of Parsippany, N.J.; and Playtex Products of Westport, Conn., on behalf of themselves and others who bought the products.

Posted by Patrick A. Malone | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Childhood Nutrition , Product Liability

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